Koichi Mitsuoka “extraordinary___ordinary” | 2021 Excellence Award winning work

ARTIST STATEMENT

extraordinary___ordinary

Did you know that a river runs underneath Shibuya? The river originally ran on the surface long ago, but with waves of urban development, it has been moved below ground.

This work was made by digging out mud from the water that wells up underneath Shibuya and then using the mud to draw on photos of the city today. The soil hidden beneath the concrete of Shibuya is stained an ochre color by the iron content in the Kanto loam layer. It is said that people long ago called this color shibuiro, a reddish-brown. I thought it was a nice color.

I find it strange to see the massive construction work still going on in front of Shibuya station, supposedly building the future right at this moment but simultaneously looking like ruins from the distant past. I wonder where we are headed.

A reddish-brown mountain rises up between the extraordinary and the ordinary.

Approximately 20 still images (3500 × 4500 mm installation, mud from underneath Shibuya, photographs)

Selecting judge: Daisuke Yokota

This work, in which mud from the Shibuya River was collected and smeared on photographs taken near the site of a large-scale redevelopment project in Shibuya, is imbued with strong performance elements in the artist's particular means of intervening in the photographs, as if somehow compensating the work for the residues that leak out from the act of taking photographs. I found the artist's attempt for consistency by smearing the apparent dazzling metropolis of Shibuya with the dregs that continually pool under Shibuya's surface to be akin to a ritual séance that conceives something in the cast-off skin of photography. To me, this is incredibly interesting and why I selected this work for an Excellence Award.

PROFILE

Koichi Mitsuoka

My grandfather came up with the symmetrical characters for my name. My mother thought up the reading of the characters (my name could be read as Yukikazu).

I went to art school with the sole intention of making Hikaru Utada music videos, and I entered the only architecture course I could get into. After much trouble,
I now call myself an artist. I want to create something in the way that Akiko Yano sings or Ranjyatai does comedy.

I wonder what kind of person made the first-ever piece of Jomon pottery?